Why Everyone Is Buzzing About This Upcoming Auction
Above: Mica Ertegun photographed by Andy Warhol.
“If you have taste, you can always put something together,” Mica Ertegun, the late society decorator, told ELLE DECOR back in 2013.
An upcoming series of sales at Christie’s beginning November 19 not only allows you to experience Ertegun’s imitable taste, but also to take home a piece of it for yourself.
Mica: The Collection of Mica Ertegun will comprise four separate sales in New York and Paris spanning art, decorative arts, and jewelry. The items were drawn from her homes in Manhattan, Southampton, and Paris, and embody her keen collecting eye and her status as one of New York’s most legendary hostesses.
Ertegun was born in Romania in 1926, but was forced to flee the country due to political turmoil unleashed by WWII. She met her second husband, Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in the late 1950s and married him in 1961. With her friend Chessy Rayner, Ertegun founded the interior design firm MAC II in 1967. The Erteguns lived a glamorous jet-set life over their 45-year marriage and had sprawling homes in Manhattan, the Hamptons, Paris, and Bodrum, Turkey. Despite their glittering lifestyle, the Erteguns also devoted millions of dollars to charity.
“Mica Ertegun was the epitome of style,” said Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, in a press release. “Everything in her homes, from the masterpieces to the functional objects, was exquisite and personal.”
Highlights from the auction will include an Ingrid Donat chaise longue that sat in the corner of a guest room in Ertegun’s Manhattan townhouse; David Hockney’s Three Chairs with a Section of a Picasso Mural, which graced the wall of her Southampton home; as well as a glamorous photo of Ertegun herself, snapped by Andy Warhol.
The sale’s crown jewel, however, is René Magritte’s L'empire des Lumières, an ethereal 1954 oil-on-canvas depicting a single illuminated lamppost. It had pride of place above the sofa in Ertegun’s Manhattan home and is expected to fetch in excess of $95 million. “An icon of Surrealism, the Ertegun Magritte is arguably the finest, most deftly rendered and hauntingly beautiful of the series,” said Carter. “Like Mica’s eye, it is perfect.”
According to Christie’s a portion of the sale’s proceeds will go towards philanthropic causes.
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